


The Mortician

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Because You Know Jason Won't, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Giving Lincoln His Due, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s03e09 Stealing Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 16:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6432178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She thinks the heavy rains may be enough to convince Pike to let her grant Lincoln the funeral rites of his people — a grave cannot be dug in these conditions. Abby knows nothing of how to build a pyre, but she knows that he shouldn’t be buried. Not on this bloodied ground; its loamy soil will not swallow up Lincoln kom Trikru’s bones to be trampled and forgotten by Charles Pike’s blind hatred.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mortician

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WonderTwinC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderTwinC/gifts).



> **A/N:** This fic is sort of a mess narratively, much like I am right now. A gift for my friend, Ched, who is even more wrecked about Lincoln's death than I am.

Her boots are waterlogged, her pants slick with mud. But she thinks the heavy rains may be enough to convince Pike to let her grant Lincoln the funeral rites of his people — a grave cannot be dug in these conditions. Abby knows nothing of how to build a pyre, but she knows that he shouldn’t be buried. Not on this bloodied ground; its loamy soil will not swallow up Lincoln kom Trikru’s bones to be trampled and forgotten by Charles Pike’s blind hatred.

“It’s my job,” she tells Pike. “I’m the chief medical officer. I need to file a death certificate.”

It was a hasty excuse, one she expects Charles to call her out on. She expects the entire night to unravel, that Pike will see Marcus’ fingerprints on her jacket and neck, see his lips on hers and see her hands unlocking his fetters. But Pike blinks, disinterested. And lets her nod to Monty and Jasper, carefully loading Lincoln onto the canvas stretcher, and bring him inside.

 

 

 

It’s either a reaction to the tranquilizer or the paralysis of her grief, but Octavia sits shaking and sweating in the damp cave where they first take shelter. There’s nothing he can tell her. Life takes from them all, but none more so from Octavia Blake. Kane knows that he’s taken from her, too.

First her mother, then her brother and her freedom, all within days of each other.

There is still so much that he has yet to atone for. But he’ll keep Octavia safe. He’ll do everything he can to keep the rest of the children in his care _safe._ His life is no longer a calculation of costs and benefits and analysis of death rates against the minimum population needed to provide the diversity for their genes to survive. Every life is sacred.

Marcus Kane doesn’t know what a father’s love feels like.

His father left. Not an entirely feasible thing to do when you live in a space station; he saw him, of course. Everyone saw his father. And then when he was twenty-four, he handed over evidence of his father’s black market operation to his superiors on Alpha Station, and his father was floated. Then he stopped watering the Eden Tree, stopped visiting Mecha, stopped seeing his mother unless she stopped him in the corridor.

(When you start looking at the bigger picture, you stop focusing on how you used the death of a man who never loved you to gain a promotion.

His mother never blamed him.)

He’s seen the way that Abby loves Clarke, that David loves Nate, that Hannah loves Monty. Love like that is something he’s on the outside of. _Oh no,_ he thought as Abby framed his face in her hands. _No, don’t do that to yourself._ He has never been a good person to love. But these kids don’t love him.

Harper cleans her gun with a sooty rag.

He’s made them all into weapons. Gunpowder and steel, folded iron and sharply-honed blades.

Octavia’s sword rests on the ground at her side. The ground is wet. Everything in the cave is wet, the ceiling and the walls and the rock faces climbing up through the back and descending down to a narrow cavern of drinkable water. It’s a poor respite from the rain, the sudden grip of wind and hail that seems to indicate that nature will savage them for Lincoln’s execution.

Water, trickling under the collar of his jacket and down his back, is cold. Octavia sits shoulder to shoulder with him, her shoulders squarely over her pelvis, her eyes staring straight ahead. She shivers, but unlike brittle iron or immovable steel, she does not shatter or warp. Octavia is another kind of weapon, fluid and stealth and unblinking. A melee weapon, instead of a gun or a sword.

He does not know how to soften her; his mother must have had the same doubts about him.

“I don’t hate you,” she murmurs, and Kane realizes he’s been staring.

“It’s not myself I’m worried for.”

Eyes hemmed with tears, she inclines her head forward. “Abby is a survivor.”

“I’m not worried about Abby.”

That is entirely a lie. She can see it plainly on his face; Kane wears his anguish with little disguise or dressing. There is hardly an emotion that cannot make itself apparent on his features. It would irritate her, if she didn’t know that the hands that gently grabbed her arms were his when she saw Lincoln go to his knees. Without even looking, or hearing the cadence of his voice, the size of his breaths.  

“Bullshit,” she seethes. “You left her there. You left her for Pike to do whatever he wants with. You think he won’t find out that she helped you?”

Abby is a survivor, but she is also a fighter. Abby will go to her knees in the mud like Lincoln did and allow a bullet to be put through her skull before she allows her people to be murdered. Kane could have coaxed her to come, plied her with a sweeter kiss or headier words.

He grabs her hand, tugging her limp fingers through his. “This is _not_ your fault.”

The rain drips through a hole in the grassy ceiling — _drip, drip drip._ It would be maddening, if not for the low susurration of rain echoing through the mouth of the cave.

“Then whose is it?”

 

 

 

There are other rites of the dead in Grounder culture, beyond the pyre. For the first time since his swearing-in as Chancellor, Pike allows her into the prison to see the sick inmates. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, tending to a feverish woman she knows as Alix. “I couldn’t save him. I’m so sorry.”

“He saved us,” she whispers back, pressing a cold compress to her wife’s forehead. “Please, we need to prepare him for the next world. There are things that must be done, we must do them.”

“I will do them—”

On the Ark, bodies are returned to the ground.

On the ground, they are burned so that their ashes may ascend.

There are oils for anointing and clean linens and the ashes of sacred flowers and herbs, burned down into brightly-colored powders to be sprinkled by the family to join their loved one in the next life, to curl up into the sky as if to say _I was here, I was loved, I was brave._ Abby does not know where she will find any oils, but she has medicinal herbs. Black cohosh, for menstrual pains. Lavender, for headaches. St. John’s Wort, for depression. Purple and pink and yellow, but nothing to create the bright red reserved for warriors of the Woods Clan.

Then there is what Abby herself feels like she must do, as Lincoln’s friend.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Her hands feel clumsier than they have at any time since she first apprenticed to become a surgeon. Even though his body will be wrapped in linens, she cannot let him leave her care without closing his wounds or cleaning the mud and blood from his skin.

“You deserved so much more than this.” Slowly, she threads the curved needle. The pads of her fingers are numb, but she manages. Tears burn at the edges of her vision, but she cannot cry. Not until she’s done this for him. “You deserved to see the peace you fought so hard for. You deserved to grow old with Octavia, watch your children be born and grow up and have children of their own. You had faith in us, and at every turn we betrayed you. Everyone except Octavia.”

Tenderly she cleans the exit wound, removes bone fragments and brain matter with a gentle hand and cotton swab. Then, she picks up the needle and begins the sutures, pulling each stitch tight with a sense of deliberateness.

“I promise I will look after her, as much as she’ll let anyone look after her. I promise I will look after your people as if they were my own. I will protect them like you protected them, and us.”

His blood is dried to a deep, sticky red. She places a second stitch, and then a third, and a fourth. The skin on the head is slight and fragile, but Abby does not have to worry about paining him when she makes the stitches tight and close. The fifth closes the ragged skin together, and if not for the crater in his skull where she was forced to remove bone turned to dust, it would look like a superficial wound.

Almost like he was sleeping.

Lincoln’s mouth is curved in a solemn expression, his brow relaxed into thoughtful line.

“I love him,” she murmurs, moving her stool to the other side of the table so she can begin piecing the other side of his head back together. “And you saved him, by giving him Octavia to take care of. I know that’s not why you did it, but thank you. Thank you for saving all of us, over and over again. Thank you for saving my daughter. Marcus will take care of Octavia, and I will take care of your people. I’ll free them. I’ll free all of us.”

She packs the entry wound with gauze.

“I know you grounders like scars. And they don’t bother me, either. As a doctor, it lets me know that the injury has healed. But I need to close these for you, honey.”

This side does not stitch as well as the other. Much of his frontal and parietal lobes have been destroyed, and no matter how much she packs the wound, she cannot get it to close without ruining the structural integrity of his right cheek and temple. It has to look like Lincoln.

A pair of boots shuffles across the floor.

“Jasper?”

And Monty, walking more quietly beside him. “How can we help?”

 

 

 

Raven provides them with a small tub of plaster from engineering, simultaneously relieved and on-edge that Sinclair was able to escape. Abby mixes the plaster with gauze, and is at last satisfied with the repair to Lincoln’s face. Cleaning his body she delegates to Monty and Jasper, giving them a basin of warm water and soap and a stack of bleached rags. Silently they set to the task of cleansing his skin — they have no clean clothes to dress Lincoln in, and on the Ark the dead were returned to the ground in simple shifts made of tatters. But they’re even more desperate for clothes here on the ground, and have nothing to spare for even the most basic of garments.

They remove his clothes down to his underthings.

Hands going numb again, Abby folds his pants and shirt neatly, and then hangs his jacket over the back of her chair. She’s at a loss about what to do with the boots Monty hands her; it feels wrong to return Lincoln’s things to be repurposed. He’s worn these boots since before he came with them to Arkadia.

“Don’t miss his feet,” she rasps, twining her fingers through the chain around her neck.

Jasper nods jerkily.

This should be conducted by his family, his fellow warriors. Instead it is a loose cadre of people he’s known for mere months, who are connected to him through the sole point that he, at one point, saved their lives.

“This is my fault,” Monty mutters. “This is all my fault, if only I’d—”

Barking a desperate laugh that startles them all, Jasper shakes his head. Twitching, he notices them looking at him, and shrinks into self-consciousness.

“None of us are innocent,” he says, his voice a low scraping sound.

Monty looks down at Lincoln.

“But not all of us are guilty.”

 

 

 

There are two journals on her desk in medical. One of her personal surgical notes, the closest thing she’ll have now to comprehensive records of the day-to-day needs of her practice. In it are drawings and notations of local plants, all drawn and diagrammed by Lincoln in his sharp print.

Monty was able to locate rosewater.

It’s not this oil that Alix told her about, but at least it is something. She cleans out the soapy tub and refills it again. It takes close to half an hour, and she knows that if the wrong person notices that she’ll be reprimanded for wasting water, but she’s oddly calm in the proceedings. Monty adds the rosewater and then they place in the strips of linen — sheets off of unused beds — into the water to soak.

Abby sits at her desk, slowly flipping through the pages of her journal. She traces his letterings and illustrations, not reading the words or memorizing the images but rather the imprint of Lincoln’s mind on the pages. A mind that is now in the mud.

It will not leave her, not until she dies herself, that Charles Pike made a man kneel in the mud before shooting him in the head.

She stares at the page — _sage, parsley, tansy_ — until her eyes blur over.

Floating is a kind word for the actual process of sending a human being out of an airlock; within moments they are killed by the vacuum of space. They are flung out into the vastness, limbs sprawled like a rag doll as the doors release. It is not graceful, or dignified. No death is, Abby thinks, after twenty years’ experience in medicine. It does not matter how you go.

But to make a man kneel in the mud, knowing that is where his body will land—

It is more than gratuitous.

She knows too keenly the pain that Octavia is feeling.

Wood, she thinks. They need wood, for a pyre. But it’s been raining for days and there’s not a dry log in camp. And then there comes the matter of soliciting approval for the use of the lumber, to bury their enemy.

But — Abby snaps the journal shut, staring hard at its cover — it must be done.

 

 

 

David Miller provides them with a stack of broken down pallets and destroyed furniture, and then lingers in the medical bay at the table on which Lincoln’s body lays. Abby has been awake for more than twenty-four hours; her legs tremble when she stands, joining him on the other side of Lincoln’s body.

“People respected him,” he says, clasping his hands tightly in front of him. “Farm station didn’t, but those of us who were at Mount Weather — we know that he didn’t abandon us. He carried the wounded back to camp. He helped heal them. He helped us fight. People haven’t forgotten that.”

Abby nods.

“He saved my son.”

Lip trembling, she places her hand across Lincoln’s brow as if there was one last measure of comfort she could bestow upon him as a doctor or mother.

 

 

 

As they wrap him in rose-scented linens, Abby sits at her desk and opens her second journal. One page bears a list of the dead. A second, a list of births.

The second page is empty. For the briefest amount of time, Abby lets a thought take root in her head — after Jake, she had her implant removed.

She has to believe she’ll see Marcus again. 

The opposite of war is creation; she is still young enough to bear a child. She yearns for Marcus with every aching muscle in her body. But the record of births is empty, and will remain so if Pike continues to drive them towards famine and war, and the record of deaths will only grow and grow.

It is a fleeting thought, indulgent.

She bites down a sob when she moves her pen to set Lincoln’s death into reality with blue ink. Her lie to Pike about a death certificate was just that, a lie. But like any good physician, she keeps her own notes.

_Name: Lincoln kom Trikru. TOD: 2/18/2150, 0720 hours. Cause of Death: Homicide._

He will not be forgotten.

Least of all by her.

 

 

 

They light the pyre the next morning, during the shift change of the guard. It gives them the most cover to get the flames going, so be it that someone comes along on Pike’s orders and tries to extinguish them. It is David and Monty and Jasper who carry Lincoln’s body to the pile of lumber, Raven who brings gunpowder diluted with some colored compound she manufactured overnight — it’s not red, but it’s close. Abby adds in her own willow bark and echinacea.

Monty and Jasper manufacture the torch.

They do not stay long, cannot stay. It is too dangerous now, not knowing what Pike may or may not consider treason. But they linger in the misty grey dawn, watching until the fire licks at Lincoln’s form, and then consumes it.

“Yu gonplei ste odon,” Abby whispers, crossing her arms under her chest.

The words are bulky and unfamiliar in her mouth, but they are as important to the ritual as anything else Alix told her. Then they leave, exiting into different parts of Alpha Station. She does not care to know when Pike is informed of the cloud of orange rising above Arkadia, it is too late for him to extinguish the pyre without having too much of a mess on his hands.

But still, she notices that there are others — the kids, mostly, former delinquents — who stop momentarily before the funeral pyre and pay their silent due.

Lincoln ascends into the atmosphere, a million particles of light.

 

 

 

The drop ship was decided to be the safest place to spend the night; Harper, Nathan, and Octavia know the structure top to bottom, and have had to secure it before, defend it from better-armed forces than a limited assembly of guards sent by Pike. It’s too risky to try bargaining for a place with the grounder army at the blockade.

The drop ship not a comfortable place to sleep, but it’s warm and it’s dry and they take turns manning a watch, though Kane doubts that they were followed. He manages a few hours of restless sleep on the second tier of the ship, descending back to the ground floor sometime around dawn.

Octavia is not at her post.

Heart thundering, he pushes his creaky morning joints to move faster, throwing back the tarps covering the entrance — only to find Octavia standing in the grassed over center of what was once the hundred’s encampment.

In the distance the bleak sky is painted the most magnificent colors, plumes of red and orange and purple.

“What is that?” he asks, half in awe and half in fear.

He looks to Octavia for an answer, but finds her shoulders shaking. With a keening cry, she drops to her knees, arms hanging at her sides.

Slowly, he walks over wet grass to where she has landed, and then kneels down next to her. Half expecting her to push him off her, he wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her head to rest under his chin. Octavia trembles, but no tears fall. There is sorrow on her face, but only under swaths of rage — anger rattles her slight frame like a tuning fork. She exists now in the key of grief and vengeance, bulwarked by her love for Lincoln and her duty to his mission.

But one needs more than ideology to lean on.

They stay on the grass until the sky is grey once more.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
